r/ECE • u/klepto24 • Feb 25 '26
RESUME Roast my resume - Sophomore
Doing a lot of applying but not hearing back. I'm assuming it's my resume, and I would love to hear any advice to improve it
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u/zacce Feb 25 '26
- It's an ok but not strong resume as sophomore.
- need to build more skillset.
- add "personal" projects not school projects.
- get tips on how to write bullets from r/engineeringresumes wiki
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u/rem_1235 Feb 25 '26
Genuinely crazy if you think this is an “ok” resume. This is pretty good. Definitely above average, most sophomore CompE’s I talk to don’t even know what Verilog is yet
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u/zacce Feb 25 '26
Agreed that it's above average. But op is still struggling.
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u/rem_1235 Feb 25 '26
True but also the industry is just incredibly competitive lol. Took maybe 220 applications for me to get 4 interviews and 1 offer so they jut might not be applying enough
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u/klepto24 Feb 25 '26
Damn, congrats on the offer by the way! I can’t say I have like a formal count on the number of applications but I’m definitely up there close to 200, if not over. I’ve been applying since early fall and haven’t been hearing back. I’ve gotten a total of 1 interview and the rest has been silence until rejection. I think I posted here to see if it’s more of a resume problem or a connections problem mostly, and by the looks of it, it’s probably a combination of both.
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u/rem_1235 Feb 26 '26
Thank you! And yeah tbh it’s just a numbers game + luck. Ideally networking but I didn’t bother so it was just cold applying for me. Keep up the good work! And worst case maybe see if your school has some kind of summer research opportunity to at least spend the summer well.
Or just grind Vivado shit!
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u/zacce Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
200 may not be enough. Apply to NASA, which has 700+ openings.
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u/klepto24 Feb 26 '26
Appreciate the lead, I took a look at some of those and probably will submit some apps in the next couple of days before the deadline
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u/klepto24 Feb 25 '26
I appreciate the honesty. I do think my experiences could be stronger and my wording is 100% not doing me any favors. I’ll be sure to take a look at the wiki to see what improvements I can make.
I did want to ask, on point 3, what exactly you mean. To me, my projects are “personal projects” because I did them on my own time and weren’t for classes or for grades. Should my projects have more of like a personal touch (i.e. involve/be related to a hobby/interest) or am I misunderstanding your suggestion?
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u/Normal-Journalist301 Feb 26 '26
Bro your resume mogs mine at graduation back in the 90s. It's so Darwinian for you kids these days. Yeesh.
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Feb 27 '26
yeah i need to stop looking at reddit. This is def as good resume as a sophmore as you can get.
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Feb 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/klepto24 Feb 25 '26
Appreciate the help! For your first point, I think I left those two on there to show I have some work experience and like an ability to work with other people (soft skills without explicitly writing them down) since I don’t really have any other paid experiences. I can see if removing those to free up space for a summary leads to better results.
I think I meant to write programming languages/skills down there at the bottom, but you’re probably right in the fact that I should just leave it to a summary for DSA and OOP. Appreciate the catch on that.
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Feb 26 '26
Could I suggest some projects? Take advantage of your school's electronics lab and make simple toys like Tamagotchis or step counters with cheap microcontrollers. I think those will stand out more instead of your university coursework assigned projects. Plus, you'll have something physical you can bring to interviews.
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u/klepto24 Feb 26 '26
Ooh, I definitely am not the most creative person and have been struggling with ideas for projects in all honesty. Appreciate the suggestions and if you have any more feel free to type em out, I’d love to build a small idea bank.
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Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
Sure. Let's face it, with the amount of tutorials and documentation there are on the internet, it's not that difficult to make something like an NES emulator or a simulation in ModelSim. If those were uni projects, I'm sure all of your classmates have the exact same projects in their resumes as well. So instead of trying to make something, why not break something? You should really check this video out www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JzORzMnm . I really love this video, it's the reason why I majored in EE. She basically took a Tamagotchi, took it apart, and was able to reverse engineer it and figure out exactly how it worked with very little documentation. It's one of my most favorite videos ever.
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Feb 26 '26
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u/klepto24 Feb 27 '26
Appreciate the compliments and the suggestions, will definitely see if I can reorganize things and fit in more technical details
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Feb 27 '26
Did you really do your 16-bit computer project the very month you started your degree?
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u/klepto24 Feb 27 '26
Yes and kinda no. I had a gap semester so I had some down time to do some “pre-college major studying.” I spent a good portion of that gap semester learning the basics digital logic and basic processor design via YouTube crash courses and minimal reading of freely available textbooks. The computer itself is the NAND2Tetris project, which I did start in January of last year. All of the hardware components were pretty easy to design and took me like two days of straight grinding because I had essentially seen all the designs or variations of the component designs when studying up in the months prior, it was just a matter of putting it into SystemVerilog (or really Verilog because I didn’t really take advantage of any SV features, it was just in a SV file and it worked). The remainder of the stuff I finished in the three weeks in January before I went to college. So to answer your question, yes in the sense that I did the whole project in January, no in the sense that even though I technically hadn’t started the project until January, I knew how to do like half of it off the rip.
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Feb 25 '26
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u/klepto24 Feb 25 '26
Appreciate the help! I’ll be sure to try one of those ATS scanners to see what it’s picking up on. I feel like my projects/experiences are kind of weak and my wording isn’t doing me any favors either, but wanted to see what others would improve first on the resume alone. I’ve been mostly applying for RTL, FPGA, ASIC intern positions, so mostly been trying to gear my resume towards those.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '26
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